The Great Pokémon War – Pokémon Red & Blue
Video Game Fan Theories
Sometimes small, seemingly unconnected facts can come together to create a wild fan theory. When playing through the first generation of Pokémon games, you may have some questions like: “where is the protagonist’s father,” “why are there mostly only young children and old people,” and “why is society so based around Pokémon fighting and not Pokémon benefitting other parts of society?”
This popular theory that has made the rounds for years now suggests that the answer to all of these questions comes from the fact that Pokémon Red & Blue start after a great war. It all starts at the beginning of your journey.
The whole concept of the first Pokémon games is that Professor Oak sends Red out to collect data about Pokémon around the Kanto region. If Pokémon have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and Professor Oak has devoted his life to studying Pokémon, why would a ten-year-old need to go research a limited number of Pokémon?
Maybe a recent war destroyed all of the infrastructure, communication, and knowledge this area had pertaining to Pokémon/wildlife. The Kanto region isn’t very advanced technologically to begin with, so maybe this war was more devastating than we thought.
The lack of middle-aged adults is pretty self-explanatory, as most of them would have died in this supposed war. Red has no father and Blue doesn’t have parents at all, just a sister. All of the gym leaders are elderly or look barely older than Red. On top of this, one of the few adult men you meet serves to add the most credence to this fan theory.
Upon meeting the third Gym Leader, Lt. Surge, he mentions that he fought in some kind of war. As Pokémon is mostly a kids game, it seems out of place for a character to mention anything to do with war.
Most of the other middle-aged men you meet are members of Team Rocket — a gang of thugs who could have been branded as such for dodging enlistment to the war.
Red could very well be in the first generation of kids who live in post-war peacetime, which makes the world of Pokémon seem a little less enticing.
